Web sites are used by entities to advertise their products and services in order to attract customers and increase sales of those products and services. In many cases, potential customers rely on internet search engines, such as Google™, Yahoo!™, Bing™ etc. to perform keyword searches to find entities that sell certain products or services that they are looking for. In this context potential customers perform a keyword search using a search engine and either find the products/services in the “organic search listings” ranked by relevance, or in the “paid search listings” (which are paid ads displayed by an auction model such as AdWords, for example, where in the auction relevance is a factor but a cost-per-click bid is another important factor). It is becoming increasingly important for these entities to have their particular website feature highly in the organic search results provided by these search engines. In situations where the entity's website is not featured on the first few pages (or even the first page) of the organic search result listings, potential traffic to their website via these search engines can be lost or these entities have to invest significant money in cost-per-click advertising on the paid search results.
Website owners have been performing search engine optimisation (SEO) of their own websites, or have paid external agencies to perform SEO on their websites, since the early days of internet search engines. SEO can be divided into two main areas: off-page optimisation and on-page optimisation.
Off-page optimisation refers mainly to achieving web links and other external signals like social media signals (for example, Facebook likes and shares, Twitter mentions, Social tagging etc.) to point back to the website, to improve the web authority profile of the website to the eyes of the search engines. These techniques have become increasingly frowned upon and restricted by search engine quality guidelines, and can lead to search engine penalties with the website losing rankings if these artificial techniques to acquire link and social signals are detected by search engines.
On-page optimisation refers to optimising the actual website itself: the code, content and website structure. Traditionally on-page optimisation require IT resources for any web changes. There is also the risk of negative effects of any changes introduced on search engine rankings, since the exact search engine ranking algorithms are not disclosed.
A known technique for on-page optimisation is the creation of additional content, creating additional web pages manually optimised for so called “Longtail” keywords. Longtail Keywords are search word combinations or sets of keywords of usually more than 2 or 3 words, which individually do not account for many searches on search engines, but taken together can represent 50%-70% of search engine searches and subsequent traffic to the websites appearing in the search results. The other benefits of Longtail keyword traffic is that the competition for these search terms among web pages in the search engine index is not as fierce as for “head terms” (the main search terms most searched for in any category/industry); also website conversion rates from traffic to online sales tend to be higher, since the user is already looking for something very specific (e.g. “used ford falcon station wagon with registration” as opposed to head term “car sales online” or “used cars”). The challenge with manually creating pages for different Longtail keyword combinations is both scale, and knowing which Longtail keywords to select and to build optimised pages for, to avoid wasting valuable IT resources on building pages for low traffic combinations which already have a high SEO competition.
Another challenge for both on-page and off-page SEO is however, that it is virtually impossible to attribute an exact return on investment (ROI) to any specific SEO action taken: website rankings in search engines constantly fluctuate with search engine algorithm changes, competitor website adaptions, the development and rise of new websites and seasonality effects in the market. Also, search engines try to not give immediate feedback with immediate ranking changes on any website changes, to avoid the risk of website owners systematically testing off-page or on-page SEO tactics to game the ranking system, which in theory should be based on purely ranking web pages by order of relevance to the users' search query on the search engine.
The present invention aims to overcome, or at least alleviate, some or all of the afore-mentioned problems.
Further objects and advantages of the invention will be brought out in the following portions of the specification, wherein the detailed description is for the purpose of fully disclosing the preferred embodiment of the invention without placing limitations thereon.
The background discussion (including any potential prior art) is not to be taken as an admission of the common general knowledge in the art in any country. Any references discussed state the assertions of the author of those references and not the assertions of the applicant of this application. As such, the applicant reserves the right to challenge the accuracy and relevance of the references discussed.